Here's information on Iceland's 2011 volcano, which threats to close down European skies:
[bbc.co.uk] Iceland has closed its main international airport and cancelled domestic flights after its most active volcano, Grimsvotn, began erupting. A plume of smoke has risen 20km (12 miles) into the sky from the volcano. But Iceland's Meteorological Office says the eruption should not cause widespread disruption to air traffic. Last year, ash clouds from another Icelandic volcano, Eyjafjallajokul, led to the closure of a large section of European airspace. Governments feared that ash particles could cause aircraft engines to fail, and the closure caused chaos to air travellers. Different ash Hjordis Gudmundsdottir, a spokeswoman for the Isavia civil aviation authority said: "We have closed the area until we know better what effect the ash will have." The authority said Keflavik airport, the country's main hub, would remain shut for the rest of Sunday. But officials say the eruption is unlikely to have the same impact as Eyjafjallajokul in 2010. University of Iceland geophysicist Magnus Tumi Gudmundsson said this was Grimsvotn's largest eruption for 100 years, "much bigger and more intensive than Eyjafjallajokull". He added: "There is a very large area in south-east Iceland where there is almost total darkness and heavy fall of ash. But it is not spreading nearly as much. The winds are not as strong as they were in Eyjafjallajokull." He said this ash was coarser than last year's eruption, falling to the ground more quickly instead of floating long distances.
Last Wednesday afternoon, two earthquakes shook the town of Lorca (Murcia) in the southeast of Spain. The news has had coverage on the British media. We have found some examples:
[From bbc.co.uk]
Hundreds of people have spent the night outdoors in the southern Spanish town of Lorca after an earthquake which killed at least 9 people. The magnitude-5.2 tremor toppled several buildings after striking at a depth of just 1km (0.6 miles), 120km south-west of Alicante. Lines of cars lay crushed under tonnes of rubble and a hospital was evacuated as a precaution. Wednesday evening's quake came about two hours after a 4.4-magnitude tremor. It is not clear how many people were injured, although Spanish media say there are dozens. Military deployed Spanish TV captured dramatic images of a church bell tower crashing to the ground, landing just metres from a cameraman. Shocked residents and workers rushed out of buildings and gathered in squares, parks and open spaces. Old buildings were badly damaged. As night fell many people were still too afraid to return to their homes. "The whole of the centre of Lorca has been seriously damaged," a delegate from the regional government of Murcia told national radio. "There are thousands of very disorientated people." A doctor told the online edition of El Pais that she and her colleagues went into the streets and treated people with serious injuries, many of them "unconscious".
Video report from ITN-News with footage from RTVE:
This is a report appeared on April, 11th in Spanish newspaper "El País" about the possibility of a tsunami occuring in our country. The risk exists.
In 1755 a tidal wave swept through Cádiz and Huelva, killing 1,240 people; Spain has no early warning system to alert of great waves, experts warn Tsunami is a Japanese word, but that does not mean to say that destructive tidal waves only happen in the Pacific. On All Saints' Day in 1755, Cádiz and Huelva were hit by a devastating wave after an earthquake on an Atlantic fault line some 400 kilometers off the coast. Although far fewer people lived on the coast then than today, the wave claimed 1,240 lives. Scientists don't know whether history will repeat itself next year or in 500 years, but given the destructive power of this phenomenon, they are calling for an early warning system. The tremor is remembered as the Lisbon earthquake because it destroyed the city and killed 12,000 people in Portugal. It measured around 8.4 on the Richter scale, according to reconstructions by scientists, explains Emilio Carreño, head of the Seismic Network of the National Geographic Institute (IGN). "The quake was felt in Germany and nearly all the cathedrals with towers in the peninsula were damaged," adds Carreño. The quake generated a tsunami. The cliffs of the Algarve were barely damaged but in the zone between Cádiz and Huelva, home to marshes below sea level, it made a huge impact. In Ayamonte (Huelva) alone, 400 drowned. In Cádiz, where waves measured up to 6.5 meters, the governor ordered the closure of the sea wall gate, which helped save lives. The event generated so much alarm and surprise that it is well documented. Mauricio González, a researcher with Cantabria University's Oceanographic and Coastal Engineering Group and a tsunami expert, says the 1755 quake was not an isolated case. "Over 18 tsunami-generating quakes were registered between 300BC and 1900," in the Gulf of Cádiz. In the Mediterranean, tsunamis are less destructive but they can be dangerous for bathers, and low-lying zones in summer. Since the devastating tsunami in Indonesia in 2004, scientists began to study the phenomenon and how to predict it. A European project has now identified the possible sources of tsunamis and their effect. Since the Japan nuclear disaster, atomic power plants' resistance to quakes is also under review across Europe. In Spain, nuclear plants are situated outside the zone with the highest seismicity, and Lisbon 1755 was one of those taken into account. However, González explains, "there is still no early warning system. [...] In Japan, the warnings meant only a fraction of the deaths seen in Indonesia." Paradoxically, "Unesco's detection system would enable Spain to find out about tsunamis, but it wouldn't know how to respond to an alert," he adds. González has modeled the alarming impact of a tsunami on Cádiz, now home to 125,000. "A great tsunami will hit the Spanish coast tomorrow or in 100 years." It's just a question of time. RAFAEL MÉNDEZ - Madrid - 11/04/2011
Japan's most powerful earthquake since records began has struck the north-east coast, triggering a massive tsunami. Cars, ships and buildings were swept away by a wall of water after the 8.9-magnitude quake, which struck about 400km (250 miles) north-east of Tokyo. A state of emergency has been declared at a nuclear power plant but officials said there were no radiation leaks. The death toll is unclear, but police say 200 to 300 bodies have been found in the port city of Sendai. At least 90 other people are reported to have died, and many more are unaccounted for.
Measured at 8.9 by the US Geological Survey, the tremor struck at 1446 local time (0546 GMT) at a depth of about 24km. The first waves from the tsunami have reached the US mainland at Oregon, and people have been evacuated from coastal areas of that state and in California and Washington. Some of the biggest waves of between 6-7ft (about 2m) would hit near California's Crescent City, predicted the US National Weather Service. The waves earlier passed Hawaii, but there were no reports of major damage. A tsunami warning was extended across the Pacific to North and South America, where many other coastal regions were evacuated, but the alert has since been lifted in most parts, including the Philippines, Australia, China and Indonesia.
Video of the news on TV:
After the earthquake and tsunami now the worries are about the nuclear threat as some of Japanese nuclear plants have been seriously affected, specially at Fukushima, and leaks are feared. Here is a recent video:
Another disaster has hit down under. This time it's not Australia, it's New Zealand. At least 65 people have died and more than 100 are missing after a powerful earthquake struck the southern New Zealand city of Christchurch, collapsing buildings, burying vehicles under debris and sending rescuers scrambling to help people trapped under rubble. The 6.3-magnitude quake struck the country's second largest city on a busy weekday afternoon. The mayor of Christchurch, Bob Parker, has declared a state of emergency and ordered people to evacuate the city centre. "Make no mistake this is going to be a very black day for this shaken city," he said. Power and water was cut and hundreds of dazed, screaming and crying residents wandered through the streets as sirens blared throughout Christchurch in the aftermath of the quake, which was centred three miles from the city. The US Geological Survey said the tremor occurred at a depth of 2.5 miles.
The State of Queensland, Australia is collecting one disaster after another. After the severe floodings at the end of 2010 and beginning of this year, now it was a killing cyclone named "Yasi", which hit the same coastline. Here are two weather forecasts from New Zealand TV about it, previous to the arrival of the cyclone.
Australian state of Queensland has been appearing on news reports on TV for the last few weeks as torrential rains have hit the land and brought the worst floodings in decades. The floods are now about to affect Brisbane, the third largest city in the country and its inhabitants are getting ready to be evacuated leaving their homes and possessions behind. Here are videos with the news:
The power and wrath of Eyjafjallajökull came into dramatic clarity this weekend as the clouds parted for the first time since the glacier-topped volcano threw world air travel into turmoil. Fresh eruptions thrust new torrents of molten rock through the shattered ice sheets in the mountain crater, spewing a towering wall of ash, dust and steam high into the air.
The power of the blasts has carried the ash – a potent threat to plane engines – even further upwards into the North Atlantic jet-stream that passes over the island near one of the world's busiest flight paths. It is a rare combination and it was clear that for now at least Eyjafjallajökull was not easing up. Icelandic volcanologists told The Sunday Telegraph that it was impossible to predict how long the eruptions would continue or whether an even more violent neighbouring volcano might follow suit – as it has in the past. Iceland,Europe's youngest country, sits atop the Mid-Atlantic Ridge fault line between two great shifting tectonic plates and the primal landscape of glacial valleys, snowy volcanoes and bubbling geysers is still being shaped by these explosive forces deep below the surface.
Indeed, when the first fissure opened a few weeks ago, creating scenic lava flows down the mountain, Iceland briefly gained its latest tourist attraction. But the display of natural force that has unfolded in recent days has brought misery to millions of stranded passengers, raised concerns about the economic impact of a protracted disruption of international travel and forced hundreds of locals to evacuate their homes.
"This is not even a major eruption, so it is startling to see the impact it has had," said Matthew Jones, a British glacier expert who monitors volcanic activity at the Icelandic meteorological office. Eyjafjallajökull is indeed not one of the biggest or most volatile of Iceland's 22 active volcanoes. But the precedents suggest that Britain and its European neighbours could face the fall-out for weeks or months to come. Hidden from the our view by the mushroom of volcanic debris lies an even greater threat, the much larger crater of nearby Katla – named for its ferocity after a powerful witch in an ancient Icelandic saga.
Eyjafjallajökull has only erupted three times since the Vikings settled the island in the ninth century, most recently nearly two centuries ago when it blew intermittently for 14 months in the early 1820s– an alarming enough prospect for air traffic across the Atlantic. And each occasion, it has been followed within months or a year or so by a major eruption at Katla. That volcano has also blown another 20 or so times in its own right, on average once every 60 to 80 years – so another is long overdue as it last exploded in 1918. That eruption dwarfed what the world has seen from Eyjafjallajökull in recent days, producing about 10 times as much molten rock and throwing ash an estimated 60,000 ft into the sky. Mr Jones said there is no evidence so far of ground rumblings beneath Katla – the usual harbinger of an eruption. "But we do know from past ash layers that are embedded together that the two volcanoes seem to be interconnected in the timings of previous explosions," he said. Magnus Tomi Gudmundsson, a geophysicist at the University of Iceland and expert on volcanic ice eruptions, said activity had intensified at the volcano on Friday. As winds have cleared visibility, a team of scientists hope to fly over the crater this weekend to assess how much ice has melted. "We really don't have any means to determine how long this eruption might last or whether it would erupt again," he told The Sunday Telegraph. "There's an increased likelihood we'll see a Katla eruption in the coming months or year or two, but there's no way that's certain." The eruptions have wreaked havoc for the farmers who raise sheep, cattle and horses on the pastures around the volcano. Lava is not the danger here, but rather the floods set off as the molten rock melts the glacier that fills the crater. Locals received automated text message and phone calls instructing them to evacuate three times – once because of the initial explosion and twice because of floods. And on the south-east side, properties remain shrouded in dust and there are fears for the welfare of animals that ingest the glass-like shards of ash. Thorkell Eiriksson and Anna Runolfsdottir have watched the drama unfold from their farmhouse, the nearest property to Eyjafjallajökull, where they live with their two young children. "The lava from the eruption in March just looked like a pretty little candle twinkling in the distance," said Mr Eiriksson. "But when we felt the earthquakes last week, we knew this one was very different. It's just surreal to sit here and watch the plumes of ash up there and think of the chaos this is causing around the world." Video report:
Photo: Haiti's Presidential Palace after the earthquake (above), before (below), a symbol of the country's complete and total destruction.
Here are the original versions of the songs which now have been re-recorded to raise funds for the Haiti's earthquake victims. The "EVERYBODY HURTS" 2010 Haiti-version has become the best-selling single this century with more than 200.000 copies sold since it was released on February, 8th.
Video of original song "I'LL STAND BY YOU" by The Pretenders live:
Audio of the same song+lyrics:
Video of original song "EVERYBODY HURTS" by REM (subtitled English & Spanish):
Video The Corrs unplugged live version of the same song:
The 2010 Haiti earthquake was a catastrophicmagnitude 7.0 Mwearthquake. Its epicentre was near the town of Léogâne, approximately 25 km (16 miles) west of Port-au-Prince, Haiti's capital. The earthquake occurred at 16:53 local time on Tuesday, 12 January 2010. By 24 January, at least 52 aftershocks measuring 4.5 or greater had been recorded. An estimated three million people were affected by the quake; Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive stated on 3 February 2010 that 200,000 people had been identified as dead and and estimated that 300,000 injured had been treated. Bellerive also estimated that 250,000 residences and 30,000 commercial buildings had collapsed or were severely damaged. The earthquake caused major damage to Port-au-Prince, Jacmel and other settlements in the region. Many notable landmark buildings were significantly damaged or destroyed, including the Presidential Palace, the National Assembly building, the Port-au-Prince Cathedral, and the main jail.
Many countries responded to appeals for humanitarian aid, pledging funds and dispatching rescue and medical teams, engineers and support personnel.
Artists have also contributed with telethons and rerecording classic songs to help raise funds, here we collect some of these efforts:
- Shakira does a cover of The Pretender's classic "I'LL STAND BY YOU":
- Several artists cover REM's classic hit "EVERYBODY HURTS";
Here's information on Iceland's 2011 volcano, which threats to close down European skies:
